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How-To Geek

There are plenty of third-party programs and other widgets that may help you keep information close at hand. Here’s a neat trick to keep short notes or other small pieces of information accessible from the taskbar without any extra software.

Folder-Based Toolbars

You may be familiar with the Quick Launch toolbar that was available in earlier versions of Windows, but has been hidden or removed since. Did you know you can bring it back, or even make your own toolbar like it? This same functionality will allow us to create a toolbar that contains items with small bits of information we want to keep handy. Start by making a new folder wherever you want to keep the information, and make a new toolbar that points to it.

For demonstration purposes, we’ll use “C:\Notes\Phone Numbers”

Creating a Template File

After you have prepared the toolbar and placed it where you want, you’ll want to create a template file for your notes. This file can be placed anywhere you want, but to keep your toolbar looking clean you may want to put it somewhere other than the toolbar’s folder. Here the template will be saved to the toolbar’s parent folder, “C:\Notes”.

To create your template, simply open up a fresh instance of Notepad and save the blank document with an extension of “.lnk”. Make sure to specify the extension in the “File name:” field, and change “Save as type:” to “All Files”.

When you look at the file in Explorer, you’ll see that Windows thinks it’s a Shortcut. Since it’s really just an empty text file though, trying to open it will do nothing – it’s harmless. Making the file as a Shortcut allows you to choose a custom icon for it.

Populating Your Notes

Once the template is made to your satisfaction, creating the notes in your toolbar is a simple matter of copying the template into the toolbar’s folder and renaming the copy to whatever you want the note to say.

As you create new notes, they’ll be visible in your toolbar by clicking the arrow next to the toolbar’s name.

Automating Note Creation

It’s easy to take a lot of the manual work out of this process, once the toolbar and template file are created. For the above scenario, where the notes are in “C:\Notes\Phone Numbers” and the template is at “C:\Notes\Template.lnk”, the following Batch script will work to facilitate creation of a new note:

Save that into a file with a “.bat” extension – you’ll probably want to put it into your toolbar’s folder for easy access – and run it any time you need to make a new note.

Limitations

Notes created this way have the same restrictions as any file name in Windows. Particularly, you will want to keep in mind that the following characters are invalid:

< (less than)

> (greater than)

: (colon)

“ (double quote)

/ (forward slash)

\ (backslash)

| (vertical bar, pipe)

? (question mark)

* (asterisk)

Also, there is a limit to the length your notes can have before it will be truncated in the toolbar display. Our testing saw this limit at around 410 pixels, or 38-71 characters (depending on which characters were used), but your mileage may vary. In order to see the full text of notes that exceed this length, you’ll have to open the toolbar in Explorer. The easiest way to do this is to right-click the toolbar and select “Open Folder”.

Ultimately, the length of each note is capped by the upper limits of the file system. For NTFS (the default for modern versions of Windows), the extreme maximum for a file name with a three-character extension is 251 characters. The actual maximum for most files is shorter though, since the length of the folder path can reduce the limit.

Sorting

If the list of notes becomes long enough that it exceeds the height of your screen, it will become scrollable.

At this point, you’ll probably want to get the whole list sorted so it’s easier for you to find items within it. Any time you want to sort the items in your toolbar, just right-click one and choose “Sort by Name”.

So now there’s a list of phone numbers (or whatever else you want to put in there) that’s just one click away no matter what other windows are open!

You can assign an icon to the template.lnk file by right clicking it in Explorer, choosing Properties, and choosing Change Icon in the Shortcut (default) tab. Can it be changed programmatically? Possibly, but I don't see it via a batch file. If you have a limited number of icons that you want to chose, you can just make copies of the batchfile using different template files, and set your template files up with different icons.

First:

@ECHO OFF
SET /P X=Text for note:
COPY "E:\Users\Bryan\Documents\Notes\Template1.lnk" "E:\Users\Bryan\Documents\Notes\Notes\%X%.lnk"
SET X=
PAUSE

Second:

@ECHO OFF
SET /P X=Text for note:
COPY "E:\Users\Bryan\Documents\Notes\Template2.lnk" "E:\Users\Bryan\Documents\Notes\Notes\%X%.lnk"
SET X=
PAUSE

And so on.

You could call one makephone.cmd to make a phone icon, makeemail.cmd to make an email icon, and so forth.

As @bytehead said, there's really not a way to arbitrarily choose icons via a Batch file. Though PowerShell has many more features and capabilities, I doubt it's easy (if at all possible) to do it there, either.

The easiest thing to do if you want an icon choice is to create multiple template files with icons you expect to use often, and make a separate batch file for each template. You could also use a CHOICE command in your batch file to enable selection of a template without having to have separate batch files for each. (You'd still need separate templates for each preferred icon though.)

I took mine just one little step further. I use a Desktop Prog for texting via my mobile provider without having to go to their Website, it's called Cabbage. I included the path to that Prog in my Template file so when I open my Taskbar contact list, if I click on any of the numbers it opens the Cabbage Prog. Not perfect but at least I get a little more millage out of the shortcuts.

Have you looked into the documentation for the program? It might have a command-line option that allows you to shortcut creation of a new text (i.e.: pre-fill the phone number).

If so, you could use PowerShell per the instructions linked in @bytehead's post to custom-build those shortcuts. Alternatively, you could actually use a batch script to build other batch scripts (instead of shortcuts) that will do the same job. Or you could use a batch script to write those batch scripts, and put them into another folder, then make pretty shortcuts to the batch scripts in your taskbar folder.

What Jacob says. Command line options might make using Cabbage in this manner easier. Even if you have to manually manipulate the shortcuts after you create them, it's a one and done deal. Just make sure that you back them up once you've got them the way you want them.

Jacob Zinicola has been a technology geek since the day he could spell "VIC 20". He spends about as much time trying to break things as he does fixing them. When not preoccupied with either of those, he's typically diving into the heat of a computer-generated battle or lost in some good sci-fi - or both at once, if he's lucky.